On 5/15/05, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
It seems strange to me that the discussion has gone on so long without someone quoting the relevant law. 17 USC S105 says:
"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."
It's not sufficient for material to be on a .gov website, I thought our policy pages had always made that clear.
I'm not so sure that people thought otherwise, but rather they were under the assumption that the boilerplate notices on the pages were sufficient.. ::shrugs:: never made any sense to me..
But you see over and over again 'came from a .gov website' cited as the reasoning for a PD label... I've even seen this logic applied to images stolen off the home pages at public universities.
It's wishful thinking and it needs to stop.